How is GGG going to stop D2JSP and similar scum?

The gullibility regarding GGG's power to stalk every action of every player, including in other forums, including private messages and the hilariousness of assumptions like that sites as jsp could be sued successfully (for what, exactly?) has reached a level that it is not even worth to comment on them in detail.

Sorry to be kind of off-topic or "bitchy" or whatever, but this thread should at least be in "beta discussion", but really it should probably be in the non-beta area entirely, so everyone else can put their input on it too, since IMO a beta tester's feedback on this topic is no different from anyone else who's going to play the game.


Anyway, I think it's going to be impossible to outright stop an out-of-game economy, but they probably have some ideas to stifle them a bit. Some of such ideas might be kept secret as to retain effectiveness.


I actually remember talking about a topic in the non-beta forums a long time ago (before beta testing maybe) about item trading from out-of-game economy - people brought up some reasonable (yet still problematic) ideas, such as moderating/limiting player trades in various ways.

Nobody's talking about GGG spying on other servers, Dust. They can just look on their own. If they want, they can have an item history of who owned an item when. They can log everything said by everyone and put that in a database. If two people who don't know each other are mysteriously giving each other items, something's up. If someone is giving and receiving items between plenty of players with no in-game justification and perhaps in-game chat evidence of RMT, something's definitely up.

And there's nothing whatsoever from stopping GGG from making TOR-proxied accounts on D2JSP and other forums, making deals, waiting until the buyer gets in-game, and then giving that person a freshly-created item with a very special curse: "Whosoever wields this shall have his account auto-deleted in 24 hours".

And then they keep the money from selling the cursed items to fund PoE.

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Slicer wrote:

If two people who don't know each other

How do they know that for sure?

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Slicer wrote:

Nobody's talking about GGG spying on other servers, Dust. They can just look on their own. If they want, they can have an item history of who owned an item when. They can log everything said by everyone and put that in a database. If two people who don't know each other are mysteriously giving each other items, something's up.

So when I want to gift somebody I know from Teamspeak an item a wild dev appears and deletes our accounts? ^^

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Slicer wrote:

And there's nothing whatsoever from stopping GGG from making TOR-proxied accounts on D2JSP and other forums, making deals, waiting until the buyer gets in-game, and then giving that person a freshly-created item with a very special curse: "Whosoever wields this shall have his account auto-deleted in 24 hours".

You cannot be serious. You don't really know how these sites work, do you? Besides, theres absolutely no way to tell if real money was involved or not, or where and how the users got their fg.

Do you randomly give items to people you don't play with? It's not too hard to tell the difference between plain old twinking and RMT.

And it doesn't matter how D2JSP or any other site works, because selling cursed items is a straightforward sting. Somebody at GGG or working on their behalf (I'd do it for free) has a deletion-cursed item with great mods and says that he's selling it for real money or offsite currency or whatever. Maybe the buyer uses a third party to verify that he's actually getting his RMT-traded item. All that means in this case is that the third party also gets deleted and/or banned.

Then maybe a GGG fake buyer shows up, offering to buy things for real money. "You have the item we agreed on?" "Yup." "Okay, welcome to banland. You too, 'mediator'. Bye now."

It'd only take a few stings to severely diminish the trust between traders. If it gets to the point where new people are simply not trusted, RMT as an economic practice is over.

And it doesn't matter how the D2JSP people got their forum gold. It's an offsite currency. Trading PoE items for offsite currency should equal a ban.

The real problem here is manpower and how many people are actually going to do any of this. Reading logs is time-consuming.

All of this is just an intellectual exercise, because none of this is going to pass- real-money traders are probably going to stay away from PoE, and the problem will never be big enough that GGG needs to do things like initiate fake RMT transactions. I mean, let's face it. If your testicles are shriveled enough that you need to pay for power, D3 is, like, right there.

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Slicer wrote:

Then maybe a GGG fake buyer shows up, offering to buy things for real money. "You have the item we agreed on?" "Yup." "Okay, welcome to banland. You too, 'mediator'. Bye now."

It'd only take a few stings to severely diminish the trust between traders. If it gets to the point where new people are simply not trusted, RMT as an economic practice is over.

Nice Story.

And now i tell you what realy will happen:

First of all a Ban is a bad joke in a F2p game. Got banned? No problem, create a new account.
Second you don't need to use your main account, so you just banned two new accounts.
Congratulations.

You dont need to trust new people as long as they can't harm you anway.

That's what the item curse/item history log is for. The item is eventually going to an account that's going to use it. If the sting is a buying sting, then they just find out what real account the item came from.

And then there's always "What other accounts have used the IP addresses that this account has used".

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Slicer wrote:

Do you randomly give items to people you don't play with? It's not too hard to tell the difference between plain old twinking and RMT.

And how would this be detected? Any time an item changes its owner without the latter getting something in return (ingame) GGG receives an email and its ban time?
This is ridiculous. And even if it worked that way, people would just pay some dummy items ingame (a few low orbs maybe). Congrats, if you want to prevent that you need an official GGG pricecheck on every (rare) item in the game and make trading items for another amount than the official price a banable action.

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Slicer wrote:

And it doesn't matter how D2JSP or any other site works, because selling cursed items is a straightforward sting. Somebody at GGG or working on their behalf (I'd do it for free) has a deletion-cursed item with great mods and says that he's selling it for real money or offsite currency or whatever. Maybe the buyer uses a third party to verify that he's actually getting his RMT-traded item. All that means in this case is that the third party also gets deleted and/or banned.

Then maybe a GGG fake buyer shows up, offering to buy things for real money. "You have the item we agreed on?" "Yup." "Okay, welcome to banland. You too, 'mediator'. Bye now."

It'd only take a few stings to severely diminish the trust between traders. If it gets to the point where new people are simply not trusted, RMT as an economic practice is over.

New users are never trusted. New users give first or there is no trade. And in your case of course they give to dummy (ingame) accounts, created from a different IP, which you can have unlimited of. Users with static IP would be able to buy dummy account sets. What now? Ban the next account the item gets transferred to? Brilliant technique to get innocent players banned if the item gets traded again (or gifted) from that account.

Besides, there are hundreds of cases of users losing their accounts to scammers every day, and yet jsp flourishes.

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Slicer wrote:

And it doesn't matter how the D2JSP people got their forum gold. It's an offsite currency. Trading PoE items for offsite currency should equal a ban.

There are a lot of cases where you can never proof an item has been traded for offsite currency, let it be a PM trade. You only have indicators, so there will be innocent people which get banned.

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Slicer wrote:

The real problem here is manpower and how many people are actually going to do any of this. Reading logs is time-consuming.

You severely underestimate the ridiculous amount of player stalking, fake-trading and manpower your suggested course of action would require to prevent even a small amount of players from using offsite currencies without banning innocent people all the time. Blizzard realized it is impossible, thats why D3 is the way it is. GGG is a small indie company.

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Slicer wrote:

All of this is just an intellectual exercise, because none of this is going to pass- real-money traders are probably going to stay away from PoE, and the problem will never be big enough that GGG needs to do things like initiate fake RMT transactions. I mean, let's face it. If your testicles are shriveled enough that you need to pay for power, D3 is, like, right there.

Really naive. Every popular online game has a fair amount of real money trading going on.

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Slicer wrote:

(I'd do it for free)

I doubt GGG will ever give that much power to overzealous, self-proclaimed ingame sheriffs.

You know it's a good idea when the RMT people on this forum are freaking out about it.

It doesn't matter how many hands the cursed item passes through. Whichever account is using it at the end gets screwed, and that's the IP that should get banned, because he's probably not on a proxy when playing. (Lag's bad enough as it is- who's going to actually play PoE through a proxy?)

And this is straightforward. It takes a few hours to sell a good chunk of items, but less than a minute to take a look at who's been using them if it's in a SQL database. Maybe not have the curse do its thing automatically. Maybe have someone go "Oh, this one hasn't been in a real account, these are just mules so far", and "Oh, look, that guy's on his level 70 playing with his purchased item. I wonder how to taunt him before I delete all his stuff?"

Again, they only need to do this a handful of times. If it gets out that RMT items are potentially poisoned, who would want to buy them on the open market?

Some coding, maybe a gigabyte of database space, and less than a work week of social engineering = dramatically decreased RMT activity due to lack of trust.

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Brilliant technique to get innocent players banned if the item gets traded again (or gifted) from that account.